This week, OnCall Solutions joins staffing firms and hospitals across the country in celebrating National Locum Tenens Week, running August 10 through 14, 2026. It’s a milestone year: NALTO’s 10th annual observance, built around a theme that captures exactly what we see every day in this industry, “Temporary Providers, Permanent Impact.”
Ten Years, and You’re Still the Reason It Matters
National Locum Tenens Week, sponsored by NALTO, has reached its tenth year. A decade of assignments, relocations, unfamiliar EHR systems, and new teams learned in days instead of months. You know better than anyone what that decade has actually asked of you.
More than 56,000 clinicians took on locum tenens assignments last year, and 81% of US healthcare facilities relied on locum coverage to keep care moving. Behind those numbers are individual decisions: to pack up for a rural ED that needed an emergency medicine physician, to cover a hospitalist service mid-quarter, to keep an OR schedule from slipping because an anesthesiologist said yes.
Each one of those decisions kept a patient’s care on track, often while also holding down credentialing paperwork and a licensing timeline that had to move as fast as the assignment did. If faster onboarding has ever gotten you into a facility a week sooner, that’s a week a patient wasn’t waiting.
What We See, Assignment After Assignment
We see hospitalists learn a facility’s protocols and EHR system in days because a service line couldn’t go uncovered.
We see emergency medicine physicians walk into a department they’ve never worked in and run a full shift without missing a beat.
We see radiologists read for a hospital they’ve never set foot in, sight unseen the week before, because a queue of patients needed answers.
We see CRNAs, NPs, and PAs step into OR schedules, clinics, and inpatient units built by someone else and hold them together like they’d been there for years.
None of that is easy, and none of it is incidental. It’s the standard you hold yourselves to on every assignment, often without anyone outside the department noticing, because the whole point is that nothing looks disrupted. Patients keep their appointments. Full-time colleagues get relief from the kind of overtime that leads to burnout instead of picking up more of it.
Whether you’re on-site or covering telehealth shifts from a home office, the care doesn’t slow down. That’s you.
Thank You
This week is for you. Every physician, CRNA, nurse practitioner, and physician assistant who has said yes to a locum assignment this year, thank you. You showed up for departments that needed you, for patients you’d never met, and for care that couldn’t wait for a permanent hire.
Ten years in, the theme still holds: temporary providers, permanent impact. Thank you for yours.
If you’re a physician or advanced practice provider considering your first locum assignment, or a hospital leader trying to close a staffing gap before it becomes a crisis, we’d love to talk. Connect with OnCall Solutions today.